Sorry for not responding in this thread earlier
Well I also once had a reply all typed up, and the power went out. :-(
As others have indicated, it is better to approach Perl thinking linguistically rather than in terms of data. In one line Perl's attitude can be summed up by, "Perl tries to DWIM." Here's a quick overview of Perl's overall attitude towards data:
- A thing is a scalar. Scalars can hold any kind of thing, strings, floating point numbers, integers, references, etc. Perl may do implicit casts behind the scenes at any time.
- You usually hold a list of things in an array. An array in scalar context gives you the number of elements in the array. An array in list context gives you the elements. You can access any one with subscripting. You can also push, pop, shift, unshift, and splice into the array.
- An "of relationship" is held in an associative array, which everyone just calls a hash (because that is how it is implemented).
The gruesome details can be found in [link|http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.8.0/pod/perldata.html|perldata].
There are corners of the language which don't fit in this simple model. For instance filehandles. Over time those are being cleaned up, for instance as of Perl 5.6 you can just use a private scalar as a filehandle and it just works.
That said the issue isn't generally the data structure - that is pretty simple - it is knowing what Perl is planning to do with it. And that is all linguistic. Rather than give you a tutorial on that, I'll just respond to each of your posts that shows some confusion.
Cheers,
Ben
